Social media meets e-government

Repositioning a government department as a social media business. Stephen Fitzpatrick i/view part six.

Part six of the interview with Stephen Fitzpatrick

M: You've talked a lot about how things didn’t work out - are there any examples you can give where you've managed to get things done - recently?

SF: Well, we’ve actually spent the last six months planning and preparing for the launch of the SMJ and getting people on the network up to speed with how they can contribute.

We’ve also conducted a couple of draining research and development work with the SML.

And doing less interesting stuff to pay the bills.

M: So when was the last Social Media Lab project then?

The last client-funded social media lab project was with the Inward Investment Group.

M: Who are they – a city firm? financial services?

SF: No they’re part of the DTI. They’re are a government funded agency. Their job is to pitch the UK to businesses worldwide who want to establish a business foot print in Europe.

They have a very tough brief - a very sceptical audience of CEOs and corporate researchers that they’re pitching the UK to.

These guys – usually guys - have to get the choice of investment location right and they are very hard-nosed. 

And the UK is up against fierce competition from other European countries pitching themselves as the place to invest and grow a business into Europe

So they have a tough job. Research showed that these CEOs didn’t trust marketing at all. But they did read the news and they did want to talk to the people – the business consultants who might help them relocate.

M: what did you do for them?

SF: We advised them to draw directly upon the experience of their business consultants and get them to tell their own stories in their own voices because these were the people potential clients wanted to talk to.

There was a very forward looking CEO at IIG at that time and we convinced him that IIG needed to get involved more directly in the news process.

Now, we didn’t get to do everything we would have liked but of course that’s the real world.

But we did sell in some of the fundamentals ideas and by this time we had a much more structured and professional set of processes.

So we didn’t just say – just do it. We were able to convince them with all the detail from the social media lab research.

M: so what did you do?

Lots of things – Ben is still working there and our part in the project took over a year.

In conventional marketing and branding terms we repositioned the agency online to the world as a media company.

So the new web presence is a big shift from the old, anonymously gray, government department look and feel – it’s intended to look and feel like a hybrid management consultancy and news publisher (the actual model for the news side was the BBC!).

Ben Whittam Smith - a member of the old Tomorrow research group at Saatchi is in there setting up an internal news sourcing and sharing system that will eventually work it’s way through to the front end and link up with the work we did with the marketing and editorial teams.

So the branding had real muscle behind in terms of being able to provide a useful news service

We did a lot of work internally with the marketing teams, teaching them new skills – how to read the news, respond from their own point of view, frame their responses as stories.

We also put an editorial policy in place and taught them how to set about building a collaborative news network by sourcing stories from their own people.

We ran a live ‘news simulation’ and put an editorial board in place for six weeks to give them a sense of what it’s actually like to read the news and participate in producing news process from their own point-of-view: we looked at what they should be covering, how they should cover it, that sort of thing. This fed into an editorial policy at the end 

M: Did you talk to them about blogging?

SF: No – we didn’t do that explicitly. We did look at sourcing contributions from staff but not as blogging – contributions were fed into the news and commentations process in a much more structured way.

It was a bit of a surprise when the whole corporate blogging thing took off and everyone seemed to be obsessed with what they shouldn’t say.

We were looking at what they should say – it was what they asked us to do, and because what we were proposing was much more structured than just blogging, the issue didn’t arise.

The great thing was that it gave them some confidence that they could actually do this – we helped them to define who the contributors might be inside the organisation.

It was always a matter of finding those people who couldn’t stop talking about what they do – and getting them involved in the news generation process.

At the front end we had a team montoring the news, developing angles, matching this back to their marketing opbjectives and liaising with in-house experts.

We were there to help them with developing angles, keeping the corporate voice and track and ensuring generally that they ‘kept the faith’. 

M: When was this? Recently?

SF: Not all that recently. The project kicked off in the middle of 2004 and our involvement came to an end at the end of 2005 though we still keep in touch.

The great thing was that, right in the middle of the project Scoble hit the headlines with his Economist piece and so we no longer had to work so hard everyday to convince them that were crazy and that they had been even crazier for listening to us.